Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  As did the others, Peter narrated a single segment of the film, and he was shown in the “Varsity Drag” number from Good News.

  The clips were delightful, stirring pleasant memories in older audiences and allowing younger viewers to see what their parents had raved about for so long. The movie was a huge box-office hit.

  The vogue for nostalgia persisted throughout the seventies, and it brought Peter other opportunities as well. He did a voice-over along with Liza Minnelli in the 1972 animated film Return to the Land of Oz. In 1976 he was paid handsomely to participate in “Peter Lawford Day,” one of a series of “Sails with the Stars” offered by the Carras Cruise Lines. Passengers spent a few days at sea aboard the cruise liner Daphne, saw a screening of Good News, and then heard Hollis Alpert, the movie critic for Saturday Review, interview Peter about his career.

  In 1975, some news was made when Oui magazine offered Peter ten thousand dollars to pose nude along with one of his MGM costars, perhaps Esther Williams or Janet Leigh. Both of the actresses turned the offer down, and Peter told the press that the lady he posed with would probably have to be younger than he.

  The Fleet Street papers reported that when Rose Kennedy heard about this, she “became quite livid” and ordered Senator Ted Kennedy to talk Peter out of the idea. Teddy may well have done so, because Peter soon announced that he had declined to bare all, and explained his decision thus: “I wouldn’t want to be guilty of disappointing the older generation or disillusioning the younger generation.” (Peter was being overly modest; according to a number of sources, he was very well endowed.) The London Daily Mirror had the last word on the matter when they called the idea “the most ridiculous project he has embarked upon since the days when he walked around with his initials on his toe caps.”

  Another source of income for Peter was television game shows. Many of the shows hired the “stars of yesteryear” to appeal to their largely middle-aged viewers, and Peter’s charm and his facility with word games had made him a particularly desirable guest star on such programs since the midsixties. (May boasted that Peter “holds the all- time record for winning Password.”)

  Marion Dixon, whom he dated for a year after his separation from Mary Rowan, was astonished by the professionalism Peter maintained despite whatever damage the excesses of the night before had done to him. “One morning he had to go to the studio to tape some game show — I think it was Masquerade Party,” Dixon recalled. “Peter was so messed up he couldn’t drive, so I had to take him over there. He wasn’t even coherent in the car. I was sure he wouldn’t be able to perform. When we got there he changed dramatically. It was like he was a completely different person. He seemed perfectly sober, he did a good job on the show, everything. I was astounded. Then, after the performance, he got back in the car and changed again. His head was lolling on the headrest, he was barely coherent.”

  Dixon broke off the relationship soon thereafter. “I couldn’t take it. He had no control over the substance abuse. He wasn’t strong enough to break away from it. He thought of himself as a victim. I could no longer handle baby-sitting him, which was what I was doing. Toward the end of our relationship, I told him how disappointed I was. When I was fourteen, I went to the opening of a big mall in my neighborhood, and Peter Lawford was one of the stars who made personal appearances at the ceremonies. I was so excited to see him I snuck under a police barricade and was able to run up to him and say hello. For all the intervening years I kept this glamorous image of him in my mind. And here I was with him and he was not the same person I had seen under those klieg lights. He wasn’t nearly the person I had thought he would be.

  “When I told him that, he didn’t say a word. He just looked at me, and the look on his face was very sad.”

  FORTY-ONE

  On a balmy Los Angeles night early in June 1976, Peter Lawford was having a party. Men and women, most of them twenty-five to thirty years younger than he, drifted in and out of the rooms of the Cory Avenue apartment, drinking his vodka, smoking marijuana, snorting cocaine, and popping “soapers,” large orange-colored Canadian-made methaqualone pills similar to Quaaludes. Many of the guests were people Peter didn’t know. They were friends of his drug buddies, friends of friends of his drug buddies. Peter didn’t care. They supplied him with dope and brought along pretty young girls who were thrilled to party with a movie star.

  Tonight, though, Peter was restless. He was “with” one of the younger girls, but she bored him, and he asked another young woman if she had a friend who’d want to come over and join the party. Yes, she replied, adding that she thought Peter would like her.

  It was eleven P.M. when her telephone rang, and Deborah Gould was getting ready for bed. “Debbie,” she heard her friend say, “you’ve got to come to this party. There’s someone here who wants to meet you.”

  “Who?”

  “Peter Lawford!”

  Deborah didn’t know who that was at first. Then she recognized the name, but she couldn’t put a face to it. She declined the invitation, saying she was going to bed. Her friend told her to wait and Peter came on the line. “I heard this British accent,” she recalled, “and right away I was head over heels. We talked and he persuaded me to go over. He picked me up in a silver Seville.”

  Gould found her emotions pleasurably stirred by Peter’s looks and his manner. “I had never met anyone quite like him before. It seemed to me that I had known him a long time. I was very comfortable with him. I felt right at home.”

  Peter liked her, too. She was twenty-five and pretty, with long brown hair and a sweet youthful vivacity. Back at Cory Avenue, they fell into deep conversation. Peter asked questions and listened intently as Deborah told him about her upbringing in Miami as the daughter of a lawyer, about her car trip from Florida to Los Angeles in hopes of breaking into acting (just as he had done thirty-five years earlier, Peter told her), about her small parts on a few television shows. “He thought all that was very interesting, and he said that he thought he could be of help to me. He said he had a lot of connections, and he could get me a Screen Actors Guild card right away. He said he might be able to get me an agent.”

  The next time Deborah glanced at the clock, it was four in the morning. There were still a lot of people in the apartment, she noticed; there were all kinds of things going on in different rooms. She told Peter she had to be getting home. “No, I don’t want you to leave,” Peter protested. “You can stay in the guest bedroom. It’s too late to leave now. I’ll take you out to breakfast in the morning and then I’ll take you home.”

  She agreed, and after all the guests had left she and Peter were still deep in conversation. “I sensed that something was going to happen. There was a strong physical as well as emotional attraction between us. I really was swept off my feet. He had a powerful, hypnotic way about him. He told me I wasn’t like the normal girl he met in Hollywood, that I was different, special. I do think he meant that.” Deborah slept in the guest room. “There was no sex, no sexual advances, not even a kiss.” As she prepared to leave the next day, Peter again asked her to stay. “But I need to get some clothes,” she protested. “You don’t need to get your clothes,” Peter responded. “We’ll send someone to get them. Or we’ll buy new ones. Stay here.” She stayed, and began to notice Peter’s surroundings. She had seen the photographs of Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys on Peter’s walls, but it still hadn’t dawned on her just who he was. “Then he said he’d been married to Patricia Kennedy — and that’s when everything clicked for me. My feelings for him didn’t change, except maybe that I felt a little in awe.”

  After two days, Deborah insisted on picking up some clothes at her apartment. Peter drove her, and when she returned to his car Peter said, “I want to take you up to the mansion. We’ll have lunch and go for a swim.”

  “The mansion?”

  As Peter knew she would, Deborah wandered wide-eyed around Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. “There was everything you wanted,” she marvels. “Bathing sui
ts, toothbrushes, makeup, anything. Peter had his own room there. He was very good friends with Hefner. We went up to Peter’s room and I changed and we stayed there the whole afternoon, swimming and sunbathing; then we had dinner.”

  The guest room assigned permanently to Peter was decorated entirely in black and had mirrors on the ceiling and all four walls. The room was soundproof and had a stereo console built into the enormous round bed. All a guest’s needs could be attended to just by dialing 33 on the bedside phone to summon the butler.

  “I met Hefner that day,” Deborah recalled. “He was very nice and we talked and he sat with his pipe. He and Peter were like brothers. They’d kid each other, they’d get loud and boisterous like kids.” Peter and Hefner had met at a party in the 1960s and had immediately liked each other. Hefner appreciated the cachet that Peter, resonant with history and culture as he was, lent to his somewhat checkered crowd, and Peter took full advantage of Hefner’s hospitality and largesse. At the Playboy Mansion, he could always find beautiful girls to party with. Good food, sex, drugs, and alcohol were in abundant supply. Any hour of the day or night, Peter could drive up to the gate, be waved on by the guard, and have anything he wanted.

  These and other aspects of Peter Lawford’s life-style much appealed to Deborah Gould. “It was exciting to meet people like Ringo Starr. I’ll never forget it. We went to the club On The Rox above the Roxy on Sunset. It was midnight when we went — Peter wanted to get out of the house. Ringo was there, and Keith Moon, and they were all drinking heavily and using. It was one big party with lots of booze and drugs, anything you wanted. I got quite fascinated by all this. I didn’t think about tomorrow, I thought about the moment I was in.”

  Deborah soon realized that her attraction to Peter was growing stronger. “He was a lot of fun. He was on the go all the time — let’s do this, let’s do that. He was a very up person. He was a very young fifty-two. I didn’t even realize he was that old at the time.”

  Still, their relationship took on a father-daughter cast. He would say to her, “Come over here, Debber. Come here and sit by Daddy.” Deborah would cuddle up next to him and put her head in his lap and he would gently stroke her hair. “That’s what we had,” she said. “He was Daddy and he liked that.” So did she. It had seemed to her as a girl that her father was always working; he didn’t spend much time at home with her and her five sisters. She had longed for a closer relationship with her father and fantasized about marrying someone like him.

  Ten days after their first night together, Peter and Deborah were sunbathing at the Playboy Mansion. Peter turned to her and said, “We’re gonna get married.”

  “He didn’t say, ‘Will you marry me?’” Deborah recalled. “He just said, ‘When we get married, we’ll do this and that. We’ll go to Hawaii for our honeymoon, we’ll fly on the Concorde.’ He was always throwing things like that at me. Trying to dazzle me. I don’t know why — I wasn’t playing hard to get or anything.” Still, she pooh-poohed the marriage idea.

  The next day, she arose at eleven to find that Peter had never gone to bed. He said to her, “So what are we gonna do? Are we gonna get married?”

  She was astonished. “Are you serious? Do you really want to get married now? What’s the rush?”

  “Don’t you want to get married? Don’t you love me?”

  “Yes I love you and yes I want to marry you.”

  “So why don’t we just do it?”

  After a few more hems and haws, Deborah agreed. “We were jumping around and happy — we were like two little kids. And I was worried about what I was gonna wear because he was talking about now — we were going to do this in a few days. I didn’t have time to prepare, I hadn’t told my family — they didn’t even know I was seeing Peter Lawford. Nobody knew anything.”

  They celebrated on the terrace with tall tumblers of vodka and freshly squeezed orange juice, got a little tipsy, and laughed and hugged and kissed. “I was on cloud nine, and Peter was somewhere up there, too. We were sunbathing and he told me not to be modest, to take off my top, so I did.”

  Peter called his friend Barry Marks in Arlington, Virginia, who agreed to host the wedding reception in his home on June 25. Deborah called her parents, and her mother was upset. “This is the biggest mistake you could ever make,” she told her daughter. “Peter Lawford is a horse’s ass.” Her father, however, was surprisingly agreeable and told her he would be at the wedding.

  Then Peter called Pat. “He was looking for her approval,” Deborah recalled. “She wished me luck and said, ‘Take care, dear’ — like a mother would say. I got the feeling that she was trying to give me a warning.”

  Ringo Starr’s reaction to the news was equally chilling. “It’s not gonna work out, take my word for it,” he said. There had been a number of warning signals for Deborah Gould in the ten days she had known Peter, but she was too naive — and too infatuated — to heed them. “We never did have sexual relations before the wedding. I don’t know why. It wasn’t that I was opposed to it. I know he found me very attractive, but — I’ve never been able to figure out why he didn’t want to have sexual relations before the marriage.”

  As much as she enjoyed Peter’s hedonism, certain elements of it made Deborah uneasy. It seemed to her that there were too many people around, using his place as a crash pad. “We were never alone. People used to steal things all the time. I’d tell him, ‘These aren’t your friends, Peter,’ but he didn’t want to hear that. I started locking the door when I went to bed, because when people get loaded they get wild ideas. I didn’t want anybody coming into my bedroom in the middle of the night.”

  Although she admits she was “no stranger to drugs,” she was distressed by the extent of Peter’s use. “I only used drugs socially — ‘Okay, sure, I’ll have some.’ I wasn’t obsessed with it, whereas Peter was. A couple of times I saw him so drunk or so stoned that he’d pass out, and then I’d be upset with him.

  “But he said he was going to stop all of it. I thought I could change Peter, have a profound effect on him, get him away from all that. He promised he’d change. And he really seemed to mean it. He’d beg me to stay with him and help him. He said, ‘Promise me you’ll never leave me.’ I had reason to think he’d change.”

  ON JUNE 24, PETER AND DEBORAH took a limousine to Los Angeles Airport for the flight to Arlington, Virginia. While they waited to board their plane, Deborah went into a shop, and somehow she and Peter lost each other. They missed the plane.

  Deborah was unfazed. “Big deal,” she told him. “We’ll stay in a hotel room for a few hours and then we’ll get the next flight out.” But Peter was furious. “He didn’t speak to me for hours. That’s what he used to do. The silent treatment. Punishment time. When he thought I’d had enough punishment, he’d talk to me again. It was like I was a child.”

  Peter, attracted to Deborah’s youthful freshness, became annoyed that she didn’t have the sophistication of an older woman. She was a young twenty-five, and Peter became upset with her a number of times when she asked him to explain something to her. “You don’t know that?” he would snap. He corrected her grammar and syntax constantly, reminded her to say please and thank you. Deborah thought it was “very weird.”

  Matters didn’t improve as the wedding hour approached. As they left the marriage license bureau in Arlington, the couple was accosted by a battery of newsmen who had been tipped off about the marriage. Deborah wore blue jeans and a T-shirt from a Carole King tour with “Thoroughbred” silk-screened across the front, and a reporter took the cue. “How does it feel to be marrying such a young filly, Peter?” he asked, and the other questions all carried the same sniggering implication. Deborah felt that Peter was jealous because “I was upstaging him. I was the new aspiring actress and he was the has-been. I didn’t think of him that way, but all the reporters were latching onto the ‘Aging Star Marries Young Starlet’ angle.”

  At Barry Marks’s house, Deborah’s father and sisters joined Chris Lawfor
d and a few of Peter’s friends to prepare for the ceremony. Deborah’s mother and Pat Lawford both refused to attend — and although Peter said that Ted Kennedy would be there, he wasn’t. (“We did get a call from him,” Deborah said.)

  With the help of Barry Marks’s girlfriend, the bride-to-be got ready, slipping into a floor-length off-white wedding gown that a friend of hers had never used. She was very excited. Peter came into her room and offered some Quaaludes. “You’d better take some of these,” he told her. “You’re going to give me a heart attack.” She came downstairs looking wonderful in full wedding regalia and was shocked to find Peter wearing an open-necked shirt and a leisure suit. “Aren’t you going to dress for the occasion?” she asked him.

  “He didn’t like that at all,” Deborah recalled. “He didn’t take criticism very well from anybody. He refused to change. Christopher Lawford was in a tuxedo and gave me two dozen yellow roses. And Peter was in a leisure suit.”

  The ceremony took place in the chambers of Arlington special judge Francis Thomas. Peter, high on vodka and Quaaludes, forgot the marriage license and clowned around during the delay while it was retrieved, taking the yellow roses from Deborah’s arms and putting them under his. Barry Marks joined in the buffoonery and hid the wedding ring while Peter frantically searched his pockets, thinking he’d misplaced it.

  Finally, the vows were exchanged, but not until after Deborah asked Thomas to repeat a phrase, explaining, “It’s my first time, Judge.” The newlyweds, ogled by a small crowd of Arlington County employees who had gathered across the street, sped off in a limousine for the reception at Barry Marks’s house.